Jean-Luc Moulène, major figure in contemporary art, hails from a generation of photographers eager to confer their letters of nobility on the practice of documenting the world. But this generalization, once pronounced, is hardly satisfying. For Moulène struggles to bypass the global in pursuit of a fragmentary rhetoric, one more evocative than it is immediately meaningful. Steering clear of sweeping statements, of impotent equivocations on the death or salvation of ideology, he devises tactics for quietly unsettling the quotidian, the visible order of things and representations. He weaves a slowly expanding constellation of images, forms, and references, one whose political character—far removed from that of the slogan or the flashy symbol—surfaces from out of the inframince, upholding a position of equilibrium amidst the violent winds of power. Moulène is less concerned with sounding the alarm of the simulacrum than in pointing to the possibilities inherent in the practice of braconnage, (or “poaching”), so central to the thought of Michel de Certeau.

In the 1980s, Moulène creates Disjonctions, a series interrogating the nature and use of the photographic medium as a descriptive tool. In a frenetic whirlwind of activity, he attempts to exhaust all of the medium’s representational tropes, from the still life to the portrait to the street scene. Divorcing himself from the subject, he devotes himself to describing the banal and reproducing “whatever object with exactitude”, diving headfirst into the breach Flaubert once opened in literature. This archive of the quotidian assumes a more openly political tone with Les Objects de grève; here, mundane odds and ends become the living witnesses of a struggle, the products of an interruption in work. He photographs these objects against a neutral background, recalling the aesthetics of advertising. A pack of Gauloises—the French cigarette par excellence, preferably unfiltered, the cultural counterpoint of the American Malboro Man – transforms into a pop cultural icon, the emblem of the series. Moulène enters the field of the standardized representation in order to pervert it, introducing his own critical stance towards a society saturated with images and information.

Politics never strays far from Moulène’s work. Couched within a detail, masked by the rigor of a composition, hidden behind a body or a landscape, it constitutes the missing link between narrative and form, evoking themes of history, of anthropology, of psychology. The body constitutes a particularly fertile territory in Moulène’s work, never as an object of anatomical interest, but as a social construct, a product of the Other’s gaze and of the images of ourselves that we project outwards. By means of the photographic document, he upholds a notion of the body as viande sociale consciente (« conscious social meat”), like his friend Michel Journiac before him. In this way, a pregnant woman might transform into a sphinx, a nude Jeanne Balibar capture the spontaneity of a body in exultation, while Les Filles d’Amsterdam—on their back with their legs spread open, their faces in the same frame as their genitals—exhibit their status as merchandise to a disturbed yet voyeuristic spectator. This last series contains an echo of Nœud coulant, a collage featuring two eyes dialoguing vertically along a tangled line (an allusion to Kâma-Sûtra?) and of Bubu 1er, a drawing of a man with a face in place of a sex.

In his more recent exhibitions, Moulène has developed a habit of combining photography with sculpture and drawing. If these works leave us a bit bewildered at first glance, they nevertheless constitute precarious prototypes for works to come. Leaving behind the quotidian object and the human form, he explores his penchant for geometry, the true experimental cornerstone of his work. He describes himself as a technicien libertaire (“libertarian technician”), one who creates events by subverting commonplace procedures. The works that result combine order and fragility, chance and skill: his wooden spheres are too irregular in shape to actually roll, the angular contours of his juice box (Boite à jus) are covered in organic material, and the borromean knot in Quelque chose géréralisé seems terribly unstable. This ball, composed of three tangled rings, is less a form or a background than a perceptual object. It recalls Lacan’s suggestion that the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic are all interlaced, and that removing one of these structures is enough to collapse the entire edifice, freeing the other two. This globe, covered in holes, speaks volumes about Moulène’s work; each of his pieces functions individually as a finished product, while simultaneously weaving a network of formal and conceptual links with its neighbors, constructing, little by little, an experience of the whole. This perpetual ping-pong game is constantly soliciting the spectator’s attention. Faced with the sheer bareness of the works, he can remain indifferent to them, pass straight through the exhibition without stopping. But the artist invites him to follow his intuitions freely, to bask in the experience of his own emancipation. Privy to the challenges inherent in such a task, Moulène creates refuges like Head Box or Guérite, private stalls that allow the spectator to share a moment with himself, to enter a mental space no longer hemmed in by the walls of the exhibition. The itinerary of the spectator might lead him to the coast of Britanny, a site he photographed on vacation last month. But the tactic remains the same: put away the postcard, and replace it with fragment of landscape, a photographic “all-over” that can only point our attention to the space outside the frame. The singular, once more, leads us back to the totality.

This text, however, is only a proposal for how one might construct an itinerary through Moulène’s oeuvre. We could easily return to the beginning of his story, use different examples, describe his works from another perspective, arrive at an entirely different scenario. But this effort would only lead us to the same conclusion. Through a succession of distinctly non-authoritarian configurations, the artist allows the spectator to create his own event, to piece together an infinity of possible narratives—and to express his refusal to do so as well. If these photographs and sculptures are nevertheless marked by clear intentions and references, they impose no definitive meaning. It is in this sharing of sensibilities, to paraphrase Jacques Rancière, in this democracy of interpretation, that the fundamental political character of his work shines through.